(a road trip to my grandparents’ house circa 1974)
i am not sure what week of corona it is anymore, but here in boulder it is now summer. last week my son virtually “graduated” from middle school with a youtube video sharing their 8th grade yearbook photos and some candids and my daughter’s fourth grade year was capped off with a parade of her teachers on bikes and decorated cars. both of these ceremonies made me teary and stand in shock at what has happened the last couple of months. the transition to online school was so swift and difficult to manage, but now we are all wondering WHAT THE HELL we are going to do with our kids until it starts up again?
Read Morein the last few weeks the world has turned completely upside down. two weeks ago i attended what we lovingly refer to as the “no talent show” at my daughter’s elementary school. this is a day i dread each year as the show goes on for HOURS, the gym is always a bazillion degrees (this is coming from someone who is almost never too hot) and i end up feeling punch drunk and cheering too loudly out of desperation for it to end. this year my girlfriend confided that she’d had two beers before she came, which i thought was brilliant. in NINE years i have never thought to give myself an aid like that. and now i may never have to because it’s hard to imagine in our new corona reality that we will ever jam ourselves into a hot, stuffy gym with fourteen million elementary school kids, their sneezy, coughy siblings and all their parents and grandmas and grandpas to boot.
Read Morei moved to new york to go to grad school when i was twenty-three or four. i felt like i needed to stay after i completed my program because my studies had been so intense that i might as well have been in kansas for all i saw of the city. thus began the cycle of my tortured clashesque dilemma: “should i stay or should i go now?” that i revisited each summer. the appeal of california was strong - my whole family was there, it was the landscape of my childhood and i am generally a sunny person in keeping with the california persona. but new york offered so many freedoms - the ability to pop into a taxi without worrying about the directions, a numbered grid geography that also alleviated my navigational challenges (unless i was too far downtown where the streets are a jumble of unalphabetized names), the potential to be both anonymous (not having to smile and say hello to everyone you pass on the street as is customary in california - i find this friendliness EXHAUSTING) and known (by my dry cleaner, my bodega guy, my corner take out) and, of course, the SUBWAY - such an easy system that even i, who continues to get lost in my own hometown, could competently traverse the city. my california/new york conflict was so strong that for a while, i would only date transplanted californians, in case i decided i wanted to move back.
Read Moreeach fall in boulder, there is at least one wednesday morning when you are supposed to bike your children to school. i live on 7th between the “c” and “d” streets and school is on the “h” street and 9th… so really, school is only six blocks away. that may not seem like a lot (especially since we lived in amsterdam for nearly six years and i biked everywhere), but you have to take into consideration the hills and the severe altitude we have to deal with here in our mountain town. when i was married, i always pushed the “bike to school” responsibility onto my husband. when we got divorced and our parenting plan was set, giving me the kids every wednesday, i considered asking for a special stipulation exempting me from those particular wednesday mornings. but we had enough to sort out and i kept my mouth shut.
Read Moreevery summer the kids and i spend a month in northern california. they go to camp during the day (kee tov) where they each have a gang of dear friends because all the same kids return year after year. EVERY day they come home smiling and full of stories about their crazy camp adventures. they also come home VERY dirty, which is a bit challenging for me, but i try not to get too flapped and keep baby wipes in the car, except on “messy day” when they need to be seriously hosed down and baby wipes are moot. (on messy day they are squirted with paint and chocolate sauce and whip cream and slime and whatever else their counselors come up with… they get off the bus wearing garbage bags!)
Read Morewe moved to amsterdam from san francisco when i was pregnant with my first baby. we stayed there for nearly the first five years of his life and the very beginning of my daughter’s. traveling with babies is not easy… particularly on eleven hour international flights. and then when you arrive there is the horrendous jet lag that kicks in (there’s a NINE hour time difference between california and the netherlands.) so i only brought my children home once a year, but we would stay for at least a month to stabilize and enjoy the visit before heading back. now that we live in colorado we have continued this summer tradition. the kids LOVE their camp in berkeley (kee tov) and i get to spend time with my family and all my growing up friends.
Read Morethe fall before last, two new activities coincided for me… i started dating again and i joined a jane austen book club. the first activity was pretty nerve wracking. i had tried to sign up for the bumble app many months before, but you can only use it on your phone and the writing was so small that i couldn’t see it and i closed it down. i had to get reading glasses a couple of years ago and i am still very upset about it. my entire family has worn glasses for decades and i was a bit vain about my unique 20/20 vision. i used to be able to see everything so clearly, even street signs blocks away - that was really helpful with my directional challenges - until i noticed that my texts were fuzzy in the mornings. i thought it was just because i am always tired (SLEEPING is something else i was really good at until the last few years and i am also pretty upset about that!) until i realized that my texts were fuzzy in the middle of the day too. so i finally went to an eye doctor (a place i had NEVER been before) and got checked. sure enough, i needed readers. i bought my first pair at the doctor’s office and they were expensive, which was a bummer. and they did not last long, as i fall asleep reading most evenings and they got mashed one night when i rolled over on them. now i just get them at the walgreens… between hank sneaking them into the backyard to gnaw on and me smashing them in my sleep (i frequently wake up with a dent in my forehead now, which is annoying when i have an early meeting because it typically takes a few hours to go away) they are pretty temporary possessions.
Read Morei booked our holiday to sayulita several months ago and then promptly forgot about it. two days prior to our trip, i looked up our flights and discovered we were meant to depart at seven IN THE MORNING! i must have had a good reason for choosing a flight at an hour that meant we would have to get up in the middle of the night, but i honestly can’t remember it. so at the last minute, we decided to go the night before and stay at the lovely westin at DIA. this hotel, designed by gensler, is in the shape of those little wings they used to give children on flights when i was a kid. the best part is the pool on the top floor in the dip between the wings. we stayed there once before when we got blizzarded in right before christmas and no flights were leaving. the view then was pretty surreal as there is nothing around the denver airport and there was so much snow it felt like we were on the moon. on that trip we spent hours in the restaurant brunching (i still think about this delicious breakfast sandwich we ate with bacon, egg, cheese and avocado that i could never properly replicate), watching movies and swimming. it was a wonderful way to start our vacation. this time was not as relaxing because we still had to get up at 4 am, but we did have room service at 4:30 am… there are not many things better than someone knocking on your door bearing a little trolley of coffee and warm breakfast.
Read Morelast week i went to see my superstar colorist, liz murphy, so she could paint away the pesky “sparklers” that insist on growing out of my head and she was shocked by the big dent next to my eyebrow. “what happened to you?” she asked. “oh, i fell asleep on my glasses last night reading.” liz is a big reader too and understands that changing my bedtime routine is not an option. but i had already been awake for several hours and the mark on my face was still quite prominent and definitely not pretty, so clearly, something had to change. liz, who has the wisdom of yoda, but looks like a bombshell, said, “you need a reading device, like a kindle or an iPad.” of course i have heard of the kindle, but i have not been interested in them because i love holding an actual book. i love the feel of the paper and “personalizing” my books by turning down the pages of passages i like or bending the page corners to remember my place (this doesn’t happen all that often as i usually fall asleep before i manage to do that.) i like arranging my finished books on my bookshelf so i can reference them later or lend them out to friends. and i love looking at the jacket designs and all the color and warmth books add to a room. i just love books.
Read Morereturning to boulder after a month in berkeley is challenging every summer. i get so immersed in my california life that i’m a bit discombobulated when i get back to colorado. i forget my regular routes to places, i mix people up and can’t remember how i know them and generally feel a bit muddled for a while… a sort of travel dementia. this year was tougher than usual because everything was broken when i left and unfortunately, everything was still broken when i returned. my garage remains bent outward from when i bashed it while backing out the day before my trip. the grass in my backyard is all dried up - i DID call the sprinkler guy before leaving and he just didn’t come. (he showed up yesterday and said that a BEAR had chewed a portion of the piping for my sprinklers. i thought maybe it was actually hank, but then i saw a GIANT poop next to the fence. it looks like paul bunyan squatted down in my lilacs - sometimes there is just too much nature in boulder.) the AC in my house is still spotty, despite the AC man “fixing” it before my departure and to top it off, my car wouldn’t start AGAIN! i realize that these are all minor, fixable problems in the grand scheme of things, but it’s taken me longer than usual to get myself sorted and functioning properly.
Read Morei am not a camper. there is just about nothing in the scope of that activity that i enjoy… i like to be clean, i like proper toilets, i like hot showers, i like cozy beds, i like to be indoors and i like to be safe. so camping is not something i would ever do, even with my children. i’m happy to do camping-like things (s’mores by a fire pit, blanket forts in the living room, picnics in a park, looking at the stars from the backyard, daytime walks in the nature, what i call “car hiking” and scary stories) but i like to sleep in an indoor bed. when we first moved to boulder, i was picking my son up from school and there was a discussion on the radio about a boy scout who got his face eaten off by a mountain lion in OUR colorado mountains. the story was so horrifying that i forgot i had my children in the car until theo piped up and said, “wait… WHAT happened mama?” “a little boy got eaten up by a mountain lion when he was sleeping in the nature - that’s why we don’t camp!” i replied. and i hoped it would put him off camping forever.
Read Morei grew up on the north side of berkeley, right near the little tunnel that runs under the marin circle and off a shopping street full of restaurants and quirky boutiques called solano. my friends all lived very close by… mostly because i got lost so easily and could only have friends whose houses i could find. this was in the days before mothers drove you all around the world for playdates. i can still distinctly picture the map my friend cynthia’s mother drew for me so i could get to their house. at the time we were in a rental behind the library and i had to walk three long blocks past the firehouse (she made a perfect circle that i marveled at, to indicate the station, as berkeley’s no. 4 is cyclindrical - designed in 1960 by ratcliff architecture) and turn right on los angeles for half a block. i carried that map with me for months (yes - i am a SLOW geographic learner) when i was going to her house.
Read Morethe first time it happened, the kids had taken hank over to their father’s house. i got an excited phone call AND photos. i had really hoped that we would never have to deal with this because hank is so mellow, but there it was, a glossy, hot pink protrusion coming out of hank’s nether regions. i have to say, if you didn’t think about what it was, it was really quite pretty… so shiny and my favorite hue of pink. it is rumored that someone touched it (before really understanding what it was) but that has not been confirmed.
Read Morei love learning about the histories and adventures of my clients. my goal, as a designer, is to help them create a home that provides a platform for the artifacts, photographs, books and unique objects that represent their experiences in an integrated, personal manner.
Read Morei am one quarter german and three quarters mish mosh northern european. to my knowledge, (although i’ve never used ancestry.com) i do not have a speck of french blood in me. this has always seemed grossly unfair as i spent all four and a half years of college studying french… even spending one semester in paris at the sorbonne in an intensive grammar program and a couple of summers working for french-speaking families as an au-pair. to top it off, i never even had a french boyfriend.
Read Morethe dutch east india company was founded in 1602 and monopolized both asian and european trade for two centuries, a period known as the dutch “golden age.” a wealthy dutch merchant class was established and the netherlands was the center of some of the greatest achievements in art and academia (think rembrandt, vermeer and hals, the invention of the pendulum clock, the discovery of bacteria, the first modern stock exchange…) at the start of this era, tulips were imported to holland from the ottoman empire. these brightly hued flowers with petals growing in the shape of elegant teacups completely captured the dutch and became highly valued. the “tulpiere” vase was designed to hold individual stems, as each blossom was considered so precious. by 1636, the tulip bulb was the fourth leading dutch export, following gin, herring and cheese and “tulpenmanie” was at its height. tulips became so expensive that they were treated as a form of currency and a speculative frenzy ensued. it is said that one canal mansion was offered in trade for just ten rare bulbs. in 1637, the tulip market crashed after buyers in haarlem refused to show up to a scheduled auction and make good on payment. some believe that the haarlemmers stayed home because the bubonic plague was going around and they didn’t want to stand around in a big, infected crowd. since this was long before purell’s product launch in 1988, it is completely understandable. the burst of the “tulip mania” bubble did not have a lasting impact on the dutch economy, but it did effect the dutch psyche and is considered a reminder to stay grounded when making financial decisions. tulips continue as a beloved and iconic symbol of the netherlands (as do gin, herring and gouda, also popularized during the golden age) and today’s dutchies still love to chat about the period in history when a country the size of maryland fairly dominated the world.
Read Morei moved to amsterdam in august, but you wouldn’t have known it was summer because of all the rain. there is the general misting present most days that you can still walk around in and then there are the serious downpours where you need to go inside. one of my earliest rain-evading discoveries was the chocolate shop, pompadour. this “gezellig” (dutch word for cozy, but meaning so much more) patisserie was located just around the corner from my apartment. it was almost a holy place for me. the interior is beautiful…rich, intricate, rose-colored wallpaper with warm, carved wooden moldings cut for the town hall of mortsel in 1895 and imported and repurposed, striking light fixtures evoking wild flowers or some kind of nature and inviting little marble cafe tables. there was just about no trouble that couldn’t be soothed away by having a cup of mint tea at pompadour. the tea was served in a large, clear glass of hot water with a couple of fresh mint stalks tucked in, accompanied by a delicious almond cake on the side. and i haven’t even gotten to the gorgeous chocolates and little cakes that looked like works of art.
Read Morei moved to amsterdam when i was three months pregnant with my first child. i had never spent any time there and like many americans, i associated the netherlands with wooden shoes, tulips, marijauna “coffee shops” and the red light district. i was leaving behind my family, my pacific ocean and my super-fun job styling the windows for banana republic. the whole move happened so quickly i barely had time to process what i was getting myself into and what i was going to do with myself when i got there, besides being pregnant. one of my favorite work friends suggested i start styling the red light windows. i could rework them every season with different themes like we did at banana and dress the women in something beyond tiny, white bikinis that glow iridescent in the intense red lights.
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